Ian Ruhter has broken some serious ground for the Wet Plate Project, which involved shooting new-school snowboarders with an ancient, 8×10 camera. The result of his work will be shown at galleries around the U.S. and Canada. Ruhter used wet plate photography, which involves capturing images to glass. It’s messy, and delicate — and then Ruhter pushed it further, exposing his subjects to massive wattage with artificial light, a la what Edward Muybridge did back in 1878, when, for the first time, people could see from his shots that when a horse galloped, all four feet were off the ground at once. Ruhter realized that he’d need the artificial light to capture action, slow it down enough without losing the motion, but you can tell from the Vimeo footage that this was still purely experimental. And even if this was all done in the name of a catalog shoot, you still have to applaud the effort for pushing things further.

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